My wife and I are in our 50s and have been cruising now for a while with an increased emphasis in the past couple years. We have cruised Celebrity before on Connie as well as Princess, RCI, and Carnival. This was our longest cruise by far as our previous long cruise was a 10 day Caribbean. It was our first transatlantic and our first foray into Mediterranean cruising as well.

We flew into Rome 3 days before the cruise from Miami after a layover in Madrid. Having missed our connection in Madrid due to some silly rule from Iberian Air about not letting the crew onboard our plane, we arrived 3 hours later than expected. We traveled with a group through a group package that turned out to be somewhat of a disaster on the transportation front. Being somewhat abandoned at the Rome airport by our TA/transportation arrangement, we were forced to purchase our own bus to the Hotel Diana Rooftop. The hotel was fine and had a very good location. Fortunately the weather cooperated as our room did not have AC.

Embarkation was another crazy day. We received notification from Celebrity the night before the cruise that the embarkation port was being changed from Civitavecchia to Naples due to weather. What a night of confusion, both from our TA and from Celebrity. I know this had to be extremely difficult on Celebrity's part as they had to contact a couple thousand passengers through various unreliable means. Having to organize 90 buses to disembark passengers from a port 175 miles away and pickup as many and get them all to Naples had to be an unbelievable logistical challenge. They came through, though, and were well organized in the Rome airport to transport passengers and their luggage to Naples. They checked our bags directly from the bus to the ship which made checking in and getting onboard very easy. Read more